The present invention relates to a magnetic disk drive, and more particularly to a method for controlling a write operation to write a command-specified unit of data to each address in a specified user area or the entire user area of a magnetic disk.
When a conventional magnetic disk drive has received a data write command from the host device, it stores the write data block(s) specified by the command into a buffer memory and then sends a command reception completion notification or a command execution completion notification to the host device, as described in, for example, Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Laid-open No. Hei 6-282944). Further, when the magnetic disk drive has received from the host device an erase command to write a command-specified unit of data to each address in a specified address range or the entire address range, it does so by writing a single unit of data at a time, and upon completion of the write operation, sends a command completion notification to the host device.